Lean Streets : Recession Comes Down Hard on the Southland’s Day Laborers

It is just before dawn at the weary corner of St. Andrews and Santa Monica in Hollywood. As the sky lightens, the whispering drug dealers retreat. The Guatemalan painters have begun to arrive.

At street corners all over Southern California, workers in mosaic tile, concrete and stone are gathering to offer their services. At others still, construction laborers and cleaners hang out. Several thousand Latino day laborers assemble like this daily.

Here in Hollywood, the painters arrive in pigment-spattered clothes and cloth caps, toting their own putty knives and brushes. All hope that the small-time contractors shopping in the Sinclair Paint store will offer them a day’s work.

But on this day, Edgar Armando Ramos expects no miracles.

“There are too many of us,” he says. Riot repair has brought a mild surge in painting jobs, but work “hasn’t been good for two years.”

Jobs are scarce in Southern California. But nowhere are the recession’s effects more evident than on street corners such as this one, where workers and employers convene daily in what is probably the most unfettered labor market around.

There is no minimum wage, no worker safety laws, no guarantee that employers will even live up to their end of the bargain. Buyers and sellers negotiate a price reflecting nothing more than the supply and demand for low-skill labor.

Right now, demand is soft. As the morning wears on, no one gets a job. When the silvery “Siggi Jr.” catering truck stops by--at 7 a.m., 9 a.m., and sometimes 10 and 1--only a handful of the 25 to 40 men waiting will have money for coffee or a taco.

It wasn’t always thus. When Ramos, whose pencil-thin mustache and weathered face make him seem older than his 40 years, first stood on this corner in 1981, he could get work seven days a week. On his current tour north of the border, which he crossed seven months ago, he gets only six or eight days’ work in a whole month.

The pay isn’t much, but it beats Central America. It also beats the U.S. hourly minimum of $4.25. From this corner, an experienced painter can get $50 or even $80 a day, off the books. For less-skilled work, $40 is the norm.

But times being tough, prices are negotiable.

“If they are hungry, have to pay the rent or have a child sick, they go for $30,” says Siggi, who declined to give his full name.

Sometimes they don’t get paid at all. Every worker has stories of employers who offered $80, then paid much less after the work was done, or of a check that bounced.

James Q. Wilson, a professor at UCLA’s Anderson Graduate School of Management, calculates that working on this “lottery basis,” the workers’ effective rate of pay might not exceed $2 an hour, “and of course no American would work for that.”

Says Wayne Cornelius, director of the UC San Diego Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies “It’s the absolute bottom of the labor market.”

Yet day after day, men like Ramos--and they are invariably men--doggedly appear at these informal labor exchanges, risking arrest and exploitation because they want so badly to work.

“You want to talk about the work ethic!” says Anne Kamsvaag at the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles.

Not only is the pay low, but the cost of doing business can be substantial. Federico Davila, a 32-year-old Guatemalan, spends $5 a day to drive his beat-up 1978 Ford in from Compton.

When he rides public transportation, it takes three buses and $3.90 just to come and go.

Ramos and his friend Ignacio Isarera live just a few blocks from the Sinclair Paint store. They each pay $30 a week for food and $90 a month for a corner of a tiny apartment they share with three others. They try to send $200 a month home to their families.

Street corner labor pools have been a fixture in parts of Mexico--where the workers are known as chambistas-- and elsewhere in Latin America, Europe and Japan.

They’re not entirely new here either. But the pools have flourished since the U.S. Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which forces employers to verify that their employees can work in this country legally.

“The employer sanctions were designed to discourage immigrants from coming--and those already here from staying,” says Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Labor Center. But he says the law has succeeded only in fostering a larger underground economy.

Most of the men outside this store in Hollywood, for example, lack immigration papers. And so they become part of California’s bustling off-the-books economy, which is fueled by immigrants--and which itself fuels a debate over whether men such as Ramos help create jobs or take them away.

Across Southern California, much of the day-care, gardening and menial construction work is done by this immigrant labor force.

Although steady work at the minimum wage is usually available in the garment industry, street corner workers say the wages aren’t much after taxes.

“I have to provide for my family, and in the fabrics, it’s only $4.25 an hour,” says Davila. “And fabrics people have work permits.”

Unfortunately, the street corner pickings lately are slim. On this particular day, the painters will stand at the corner of Santa Monica and St. Andrews in the heat until at least 2 p.m. And they will come back tomorrow.

Things are tough, but as Davila explains simply: “There’s still more work here than in Guatemala.”